We
can get more mileage out of transportation
spending by prioritizing congestion relief,
using performance-based planning and
outsourcing maintenance.

Virginians,
hold on to your wallets. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and
the General Assembly are looking for ways to close
the large and growing transportation funding gap,
and the only ideas we’re hearing in
Richmond
these days involve variations on the tax-hike
theme. Before considering a variety of sales tax
increases of 20 percent and higher, there should
be a fundamental rethink of current transportation
policy and planning to ensure that we’re taking
advantage of every opportunity for more efficient
infrastructure delivery.

Where
do we start?

First,
we need to make sure we’re getting the most bang
for the buck from current spending. Chances are
that many, if not all, current regional
transportation plans in the Commonwealth will
spend billions of dollars to achieve little
measurable congestion relief. For example, the
Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments’
long-range transportation plan will spend billions
of dollars on D.C.-area transportation projects in
coming decades, but the organization admits that
the percentage of congested lane miles will
still increase even after building
everything in their plan.

Shouldn’t
we be aiming to actually reduce congestion, not
just slowing the rate at which it worsens?
Texas
and
Georgia
are doing this by requiring regional planners (who
decide the bulk of spending allocations) to set
their sights on reducing
congestion relative to today’s levels. Like
these states, we need to make congestion relief a
core goal of transportation planning in
Virginia
and ensure that the state is making the most
efficient use of limited transportation funds.
This requires performance-based planning —
prioritizing projects based on objective measures
of congestion relief. The standard for ranking
transportation investments should be the total
hours of delay-reduction produced for each million
dollars of project investment.

Next,
we also need to continue giving priority to
maintaining our existing roads and bridges and
find more efficient ways of doing it. For several
years now, we’ve seen maintenance costs rise
while gas tax revenues fall, and leaders have done
the right thing by shifting ever-increasing
amounts of funds from the new construction account
to the maintenance account. The problem is that
the Commonwealth is now at the point where
there’s not enough money in the pot to fund all
of the state’s maintenance needs.

To
maintain safety and system quality, the state
should be looking to get the most out of its
maintenance dollars.
Virginia
has historically been a pioneer in the use of
private-sector contracting for road maintenance,
generating significant cost savings and improving
the quality of roads and bridges. The Commonwealth
has generated an estimated six percent to 15
percent cost savings through contracting with the
private sector to maintain more than 1,000 miles
of Interstates, and Florida has seen an
approximately 15 percent savings across some 30
statewide maintenance contracts that account for a
substantial portion of its overall maintenance
budget. Virginia leaders should
consider extending its successful Interstate model
to all state-maintained roads and bridges.

Some
cutting-edge,
innovative contracting models are worthy of
replicating. Missouri’s Safe and Sound
Bridge Program may be the most impressive. In this
project, the state will enter into a fixed-price
contract with a private sector team to repair and
rehabilitate a whopping 802 bridges over a
five-year period and maintain these bridges for 25
years after. Moreover, the private team will
finance the half-billion dollar project upfront. Missouri will pay nothing
during the five years of construction work,
followed by 25 years or more of annual payments
that the state will treat as an operating expense
using a portion of its federal bridge funds.
No tolls are involved. Without private sector
financing, it’s doubtful that the state could
undertake such a large-scale project on its own
using traditional procurement methods and revenue
sources. Virginia’s transportation
leaders should be evaluating similar
opportunities.

Lastly,
when it comes to planning new construction, we
need to be far more proactive in pursuing tolling
and public-private partnerships to deliver new
capacity and to maintain what we have. The
private-sector financing of transportation
projects like the Dulles
Greenway, the Capital
Beltway high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, and
the I-95/395 HOT lanes is delivering needed new
capacity to congestion-choked areas. It would make
sense to look at all limited-access highway
projects with an eye first to private financing
opportunities before planning them as tax-funded
roads, which generally take longer to build and
may take years to stockpile funding for under the
“pay as you go” system.

Before
resorting to tax hikes that will not solve the
state’s long-term transportation funding
problems, Commonwealth officials should apply
strategies to ensure that we get the most out of
existing dollars and take maximum advantage of
outside private sector funding. Rising congestion
threatens Virginians’ quality of life and
economic prosperity, as the movement of people and
goods slows to a crawl in too many places. Still,
before asking taxpayers to pony up more to combat
system deterioration and gridlock, it’s only
reasonable to assure them that their current tax
dollars are being spent in the most effective and
efficient manner.

--
May 5, 2008

Leonard
C. Gilroy,
AICP, is a Director of Government Reform at the
Reason Foundation and and Senior Fellow for
Government Reform at the Thomas Jefferson
Institute for Public Policy.